 |
| B O O K S
> Buy Darkling from your local bookseller, Amazon.com, or Tupelo Press DARKLING was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Award for Best Poetry Book of 2001. DARKLING
is a book-length sequence of elegiac fragments, obsessive ruminations
on the lives of the poet's Polish-Jewish parents, grandparents,
as well as her own, filtered through the eyes of an extraordinarily
clear-eyed contemporary witness. It would be easy to sentimentalize
the events portrayed — the childhood memory, for example, of
nearly losing one's little brother because of one's own carelessness
— but Rabinowitz's technical brilliance, allusive texture,
verbal and rhythmic precision, and especially her self-irony give
these lyrics their razor edge, their air of hard-earned authenticity.
This is a deeply moving book. A history of Darkling 2011 will mark the launch and international distribution of DARKLING in its latest incarnation—as a CD on the Albany Records label.
American Opera Projects has transformed DARKLING into an experimental opera-theatre work that blurs distinctions between poetry, theater, and music, challenging conventional modes of narrative as well as familiar approaches to opera and theater. This groundbreaking production had its world premiere to great critical acclaim on February 26, 2006 at the 13th St. Theatre, NYC. Excerpts from this “new form of theater art” were performed in November, 2005, along with panel discussions, as part of the Works and Process at the Guggenheim series. Read More. A concert version was performed at the German Consulate, NYC, in June, 2006, and the work toured in a concert version to The Freie Universität in Berlin and to Poland in 2007. DARKLING was performed by The City Opera at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2009. Previously, DARKLING had another life as a sound/theater piece, which was featured at Barnard College in April 2002 at the national conference, "Women Poets in Performance, the Poetry of Plays: From Gertrude Stein to the Present." Excerpts from reviews of Darkling “…[a] daring book-length masterpiece…”
—Sharon Dolin in Jacket Magazine “Rabinowitz muses on displacement and the fracturing of language and self, and mass murder and the guilt and grief of the living, in a piercing and powerful incantation”…“[an] elegantly structured and timely poem of loss and remembrance”—Booklist “This dense, unsettling volume makes a unique contribution to Holocaust literature.” —Publishers Weekly “Charles Reznikoff's long impersonal poem Holocaust
and the very personal DARKLING are the ineradicable Twin
Towers of Holocaust poetry in English.” —Frigate “…not a book of poems, nor even a single long poem, but a single poetic gesture, a linguistic act…” “ …an extraordinarily intense experiment in language and the emotional freighting of …lives” —Bin Ramke in Boston Review “Darkling borrows from narrative in its
implicit drama and occasional dialogue, but it is in no way a chronicle
or family album. It has more in common with the two columns of light
that penetrated the night over Manhattan in memoriam to the World
Trade Towers. It is a monument, yes, but a very imponderable and
disembodied one. If you’re ‘stalking the unpossessable,/
entreating the impalpable,’ Rabinowitz states, you need phantoms
and metaphors, not a photo album. You need words with a powerful
vertical dimension, ‘half-tones in half-dark,’…‘tentative
gropings for kernels of was…’ It’s that kind of book:
sad, wistful, ghostly, and haunted, and its streets [are] ‘teeming
with emptiness.’ It is also, defiantly, a profoundly hopeful
book. Anything this lovingly and carefully constructed—foraged
out of Nothingness—cannot help but amend, in some way, the
lives it unravels.” —John
Olson in American Book Review, September-October 2002.
(This is an excerpt from a critical
review of DARKLING by John Olson.) “[DARKLING] mesmerizes, flies through your fingers like bits of time you want to hold onto…each segment takes on its own poetic form, lending the whole a music that shifts and changes, speeds and slows.” —Las Vegas Mercury “It would be faint exaggeration to say that DARKLING is the most innovative poem of the year …” “…daring, original and beautifully designed, [DARKLING] sprawls across the page with a feral energy. It alternately cries from the depths of human suffering and soars to the heights of imagination...[DARKLING] aims heavenward…a song of the spirit, plaintive and strong, rising on wings of prayer.” —Wichita Eagle “Reading this acrostic sequence is a challenge, but…the power and vision of history and of personal redemption rise off the page in a breathless wall of language. It is a brilliant…approach [to] an enormous topic.” —Bloomsbury Review “In this book-length poem, Anna Rabinowitz assembles a stirring testament to the impossibility of memory” —San Francisco Chronicle “Reading DARKLING is like flipping through a scrapbook browned with time.” —South Florida Sun-Sentinel “Ms. Rabinowitz limns the textures of life…and the interchange of hope and guilt…” —Dallas Morning News “[DARKLING is an] effort of speaking in different voices, of traversing landscapes and generations, of trying to give words to what others were not able to enunciate…fashioning meanings and constructing images to make sense of the world.” —ForeWord Magazine “…a multitude of voices…make a poem that respects the past’s inaccessibility, gently conjuring it without swamping it in fiction.” —Interim “…DARKLING [is] a book-length poem by Anna Rabinowitz that completely blew me away” —Rachel Barenblatt in the Inkberry Newsletter |
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
| © 2011 Anna Rabinowitz | ||||||||